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first dough in decades
Wednesday, March 29 2023
I took a 150 milligram dose of pseudoephedrine this morning to help me with a big hairy software development task that I ended up mostly procrastinating. As usual, at some point I wanted to buy myself the right to drink alcohol so I could come down off the pseudoephedrine high. So I painted a small painting of our old cat Julius, the one who died from a mass that formed in his abdomen back in March of 2017. But I tried my best to keep things whimsical, substituting bright green for grey and adding bright lighting to one side.
I then drank a couple gin & tonics, which made me delightfully buzzed but didn't interfere with my ability to prepare dinner.
The other day Gretchen asked me why I never use recipes when preparing food in the kitchen. I replied that it was too much trouble, though I offered that, since I only ever make two different dishes, perhaps following recipes might be a good way to expand my portfolio of possible dishers. So this evening when I went down to the kitchen to make dinner, I decided to make something I've never made before: a pizza crust. I found various recipes online for pizza dough and merged two of them together so it would contain yeast, salt, and sugar (the latter provided only as food for the yeast). I wanted to use whole wheat flour, but couldn't find any and settled for something closer to white (though it claimed to be organic). Before long, I made a pretty convincing lump of dough, the first dough of any sort I'd made in decades. (I used to be a bread baker in Harkness Co-op at Oberlin College, where I perfected a recipe that allowed me to bake dozens of loaves of beautiful fluffy whole wheat bread with only about a half hour's worth of effort.) In addition to the pizza dough, I also fried up one pan of tempeh and onions and another of shitake mushrooms and Asian chilis. The first pan was for both the pizzas I would be making, and the latter would be just for my pizza. (I was anxious to use up the shitakes before they went bad and to increase my use of the chilis before they dry out or whatever ends up happening to them.)
Gretchen returned from the bookstore at about the time the dough was ready to be made into pizzas. She was delighted that I'd stepped outside my comfort zone and made something different.
The resulting pizzas weren't terrible, though the crust wasn't all that great. It needed more salt than I'd added to it, and it could've benefitted from having been allowed to rise more. But it worked as a substrate for the sauce, the toppings, and the cheese. I have a feeling I will be making excellent crust in no time if I add this to my repertoire.
Today's painting.
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